The Top 3 Reasons Projects Fail

Why Systemation? For more than 50 years, we’ve been in the business of getting work done. From our vantage point working inside hundreds of leading organizations, initially focusing on project management and business analysis, we’ve discovered the secrets of managing all work better. So let them raise the bar. We’ll help you stay above the fray.

If you hear project management, business analysis, and work management training and think hefty textbooks and dense, theoretical jargon, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. We know results are what matter. So we focus on helping you fine tune your approach and building the essential knowledge and skills to make an immediate impact—on your work, your projects, your credibility, and your organization’s results.

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Project Management

A multi-faceted job, Systemation’s project management training will give you the know-how and expertise the job requires for excellent facilitation, communication, organizational, and motivational skills, with specific responsibility for eight key elements.

First, the project charter helps you think through the planning of initiatives and budgets for the year and establishes clarity around roles, responsibilities, milestones, and other expectations. Once a project is initiated, the next step is creating and managing the project plan that will set context and define how the project will be executed and controlled through to completion. This is a living document that tracks time, cost, and scope baseline, a skill our project management training will help you master. Defining and managing project scope—which includes features, functions, and desired quality of the product or service—at the outset is critical. The project approach then describes the strategies the team will apply to get to the desired result.

Risk management focuses on how to handle potential project struggles. The work breakdown structure is a dynamic document that provides the foundation, framework, and structure for nearly everything that happens in project planning. From this, the Gantt chart is created, depicting the project schedule.

Last but not least, project team management is an essential responsibility throughout the life of the project, one you will conquer with our project management training. Because project managers often lead without authority, they have to be able to build relationships to get things done, enable the team to do its best work, and manage the flow of skills required.

These responsibilities are both individual and interconnected. Especially in today’s project-intensive organizations, there is no one without the other. All are essential aspects of the job.

Business Analysis

Systemation’s business analysis training courses are designed to make you better at recommending solutions that will enable the organizational changes necessary to deliver value to stakeholders. It encompasses six key responsibilities.

First, the business analyst develops a compelling business case to get approval to move forward. The most effective business cases are clear and simple, articulating business need, solution scope, stakeholder concerns, estimated time and cost, and overall ROI.

Because business analysts have to interact with wide-ranging stakeholders to move projects forward, stakeholder analysis is critical. This process creates insight into varying motivations, interests, and perspectives to determine the best way to involve and engage each stakeholder to meet project needs.

Our business analysis training is more than evaluating numbers. Every project has users, and the business analyst is responsible for getting their input, typically through use cases and user stories. The use case describes specific actions and behaviors, while the user story, which is more conceptual, provides context for the use case.

To make sure the project’s end result is what the business needs, the BA develops business requirements. These set context and ensure the project’s scope is aligned to meet the business purpose. Both functional requirements and non-functional requirements must also be defined to identify what the product/service should do (functional requirements) and how it should work (non-functional requirements), something our business analyst training will help you to achieve.

Finally, the business analyst must verify that what’s ultimately delivered satisfies the users’ requirements and works in the environment it’s designed for. The only way to do that is through user acceptance testing.

As these responsibilities demonstrate, business analysts are essential for helping an organization continually improve and achieve its goals.

Work Management

Work management is often thought of in relation to software and productivity tools. But a tool is only as effective as the person using it. In fact, while it may not be a common term in talent development or educational circles, work management is a competency every manager needs, and something our work management training will help you become proficient in.

Work management involves five key responsibilities that enable successful managers to both fulfill their organization’s daily purpose and continually improve productive efficiency through strategic initiatives.

The first step is knowing the difference between the two kinds of work: operational, which is the mandatory day-to-day work that produces the value the organization was created to provide, and initiative, which focuses on making operational results better.

Understanding how work flows within their organization helps managers identify and balance capacity to get more work done, both in the short and long term, so they can keep pace with rising expectations. Our work management training also understands that managers must also deliver demand forecasts and properly apply resource allocation. This includes forecasting demand and allocating resources for day-to-day work and structuring assignments to ensure strategic initiatives get completed within desired timeframes.

Prioritization of strategic initiatives is also critical. Managers have to prioritize initiatives based on departmental strategy and goals and then ensure higher priority initiatives get completed ahead of lower priority ones.

If managers treat all work as interchangeable, the work that makes the organization better will never get done. Effective work management starts with knowing the difference between operational and initiative work and then managing each to get the results you need. Explore our work management training courses and become a work master!